They’ve received 10 phone calls, at least one of which was threatening, as well as harassment on Twitter.

Popehat’s done some useful– or at least amusing— work in the past, so it’s disappointing to see them engaging in targeted harassment.

Additionally, this is another example of KotakuInAction engaging in targeted harassment, which is ostensibly against reddit’s rules. Like everything I write about here, this is just one example of the type of targeted attempts at silencing that GamerGate is known for.

KotakuInAction, GamerGate’s forum on reddit, GamerGaters, has sicced it’s members on several prospective panels at South by Southwest (SXSW), which uses community input to help choose which panels to feature.

The second harassment-related panel, “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games”, includes Katherine Cross, a sociologist and PhD candidate at CUNY who writes about feminism and games, Randi Harper, a developer most famous for creating the Good Game Autoblocker, which automatically blocks enough members of GamerGate on Twitter that the site is actually usable, and Caroline Sinders, an polymath artist/photographer/writer/creator. All three women are regular targets for GamerGate’s harassment, threats, and SWATings.

The third panel doesn’t actually have anything to do with harassment at all– it’s about virtual reality– but they’re still targeting it, because Brianna Wu is on it.

GamerGaters– nearly all of whom have no actual plans of going to SXSW at all– are posting their usual lies and denials in the comments and making accounts to attempt to downvote these panels enough that SXSW decides not to feature them. Like everything they do, it’s an attempt to silence marginalized voices in video games.

After posting that article about Roosh in Montreal, I actually decided to try to make #RooshIsARapist work. I kept seeing articles calling him a “controversial blogger” or “Neo-Masculinist” or other various bullshit instead of what he actually is: a rapist and a rape advocate.

People keep claiming there is no evidence of this. They’re full of shit. Here’s a selection, in his own words. Trigger warning for rape, obviously.

“I Am A Rapist”, in which he copies and pastes items from a”rape checklist” that he’s done.

“When No Means Yes”, in which claims that men aren’t able to stop having sex once they start. (This is called post-penetration rape, and yeah, people have been sent to prison for it.)

From Bang Estonia: “While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.”

There’s more over at We Hunted The Mammoth. I also did a Twitter essay on the connection between rape culture, male entitlement, pick-up artists, men’s rights “activists” and #GamerGate, which might provide some helpful context on why, even when Roosh admits to acts of rape repeatedly in his writing, even when there’s video of him touching a woman without consent before she acts in self-defense, there will still be people defending him.

Remember, these people are willing to throw money at Eron Gjoni after he physically abused Zoe Quinn, ignored a restraining order and started a hate movement to ruin her life. Their movement is built on constantly denying that it is about harassment, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Of course they’re gonna lie about one of their heroes being a rapist: they already are lying about pretty much everything else.

Over on their reddit forum, KotakuInAction, GamerGate is posting screenshots from Zoe Quinn’s old modeling profile, which was recently hacked, claiming that this is an “admission” that she “fakes harassment”.

Roosh is a major figure in the “manosphere“, a group of semi-affiliated websites for “pick-up artists” (a group of generally misogynistic self-help “gurus” who post techniques to get women to have sex with them; these techniques are often threatening and/or sexually violent) and “men’s rights activists”, who are actually just anti-feminists who don’t ever do anything to help men.

There’s a huge overlap between the “manosphere” and GamerGate; KotakuInAction, GamerGate’s subreddit, has more users in common with the Men’s Rights subreddit than any other sub. The reactionary tactics that GamerGate uses have long been staples of the manosphere’s “activism”; there’s a long history of men’s rights activists using harassment and doxxing (releasing personal information of targets) of feminists that they disagree with– they’ve even offered bounties for personal information of women before.

A personal note: I’m running this site out of my own pocket because it’s information that needs to be out there. If you want to help, you can sign up as a site patron or donate; you can also check out my other projects.

GamerGate just figured out that Randi Harper, the creator of the GGAutoBlocker (a tool that automatically blocks most of #GamerGate, which keeps them from making Twitter quite so unusable for both their targets and people interested in one of the topics that they are spamming with their garbage), is speaking at O’Reily’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) and has been flooding their official Twitter account with abuse as well as cluttering up the hashtag with the usual combinations of abuse and conspiracies.

I could write up a big thing about it, but Harper summed it up pretty nicely:

GamerGate is currently flooding #OSCON with the usual garbage. Thanks for the help on showing how online harassment is a problem! 😉

Previous attempts to ruin hashtag conversations: 1, 2 (I don’t write about this every time they try this strategy, because time– both mine as a writer and yours as a reader– is finite, but it happens a lot more than makes this blog.)

GOG.com, formerly Good Old Games, recently hosted a sale of games endorsed by GamerGate favorite John Bain, AKA TotalBiscuit, AKA The Cynical Brit. Bain is one of the people responsible for launching GamerGate; he helped the lies about Zoe Quinn that started the hate movement spread by sharing them with his followers, which were at around 350 thousand at the time.

Additionally, regarding the death threats against Anita Sarkeesian, he stated on his podcast that “I’m also not going to claim they are credible, because well, Anita is still breathing.”

He’s also recently spearheaded a group called “The Framerate Police” that has recently been harassing and threatening the developers of games who lock their frame rate at 30 frames per second. (For reference, most videos and television display between 24 and 30 FPS.)

Anyway, GOG.com is being criticized a lot a fair bit on Twitter sponsoring one of GamerGate’s ringleaders, but this is another look at how deep the issues of hatred are in GamerGate. Jim Sterling, a game reviewer who’s spoken out about GamerGate, talks about being friends with him. Steam, one of the largest platforms for distributing computer games, allows him to curate his lists of games on their site, including the aforementioned hitlist of games that lock their FPS; this feature makes it incredibly easy for his fans to leave fraudulent ratings or reviews of games based on his near-arbitrary criteria and disrupt the communities that develop around these games.

The fact is that even if many of GamerGate’s prominent figures, such as Milo Yiannopolus and Christina Hoff Summers, are opportunistic right-wingers who are latching onto a movement that supports their bigotry, harassment culture and misogyny runs deep both in gamer culture and the game development community. Despite the fact that GamerGate has been shown over and over again to be a harassment movement focused on silencing women in gaming, companies are still sponsoring prominent figures in it, apparently willing to take the short-term gain from profiting off hate’s ringleaders than invest in making women– who make up 52% of people who play games— welcome in the world of computer gaming.

The front pate of KotakuInAction, the GamerGate subreddit. Note that all but one thread is about Gawker (and the one that isn’t is pinned, meaning it didn’t actually get up there by members voting but by mods choosing to have it display at the top of the page.

On Thursday (7/15), Gawker published an article outing the (male) CFO of a major company as someone who made appointments with a male escort; the escort in question apparently leaked this information to Gawker as part of some kind of blackmail scheme. (LGBTQ Nation wrote about it.) It was a pretty yellow journalism thing to do, and a lot of people, including many Gawker writers, were upset. The post was eventually taken down and Gawker published a sort-of apology.

This isn’t actually the kind of thing that actually has anything to do with GamerGate, except that they hate Gawker. Their subreddit, KotakuInAction, is named for Gawker’s videogame subsite; their writing about GamerGate has generally been accurate and has portrayed them as the hate movement they are. Gawker itself has also written about GamerGate; there was also an excellent editorial about it on Deadspin.

GamerGate has latched onto Gawker’s mistake and is determined to drive it into the ground. Here are a few reasons why this is incredibly hypocritical.

GamerGate hero Milo Yiannopoulos (previously) “outed” Brianna Wu last year. I use the quotes around “outed” because it’s entirely possible that he’s wrong.

GamerGaters are totally okay with outing trans people as long as, by their standards, they don’t “pass”. From KotakuInAction yesterday (note the upvotes):

GamerGate is incredibly homophobic. Seriously, just do a search for #GamerGate on Twitter and add your least favorite homophobic slur. You’ll get thousands of results, and it’ll probably be updating in real time.

GamerGate does not care about privacy. They literally are founded on being a movement that tries to expose people (mostly women) who they disagree with by releasing information about them so they’re susceptible to threats and harassment.

GamerGate does not care about LGBTQ people. Their first target, Zoe Quinn, identifies as queer; additionally, they regularly target trans people in the gaming community. Previous list items show the people who’ve been outed/deadnamed by major figures in the GamerGate movement, but casual transphobia and transmisogyny is huge among GGers, and accusations of being trans (or claims that trans people are “actually” the gender they were incorrectly assigned at birth) are extremely popular tactics for rank-and-file GGers.

None of this, of course, makes what Gawker did any less abhorrent. But it does make GG’s choice to make this a “GamerGate issue” pretty obviously an opportunistic move to attack a website that has repeatedly made them look bad since their hate movement started.

Remember back in April when GamerGate took over a hashtag conversation that was actually about journalistic ethics and made it unusable? Well, Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) board member Michael Koretzky noticed and wanted to give GamerGate a chance to explain themselves. So he created an event called AirPlay for them to do so.

Today (7-14), a blog post by Koretzky went up talking about how, despite his giving the GamerGate community-selected panelists “almost everything they want”, they have already threatened to quit, and have shared early drafts that Koretzky sent them for factchecking with other GamerGaters, despite his request they not do so until the final version was published.

You can read the full details on the AirPlay blog— trigger warning for racial slurs there– but it’s clear that GamerGate can’t even manage to behave themselves well enough to handle an event that is clearly pandering to them.

GamerGaters have, predictably, been celebrating, both in their forum on reddit and on Twitter. They’re doing so with their usual, predictable combination of lies about “censorship” (they keep thinking that a private website choosing to remove their comments is “censoring them” and abridging their “free speech”):

and racism:

Not all of the people behind the harassment of Pao are associated with #GamerGate, but #GamerGate is only one of many hate groups that engage in large-scale harassment intended to silence women, people of color, and other members of marginalize groups. Many of these groups use reddit as a platform.